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Abstract

Cultural-existential psychology draws on the insights and methods of experimental existential psychology and cultural psychology to produce a comprehensive understanding of how cultural patterns influence experiences of and defenses against existential threat. This study focuses in particular on the distinction between disorientation-avoidant cultures--which prioritize maintaining a meaningful world--and despair-avoidant cultures--which prioritize maintaining people's sense that they are valuable individuals. Disorientation-avoidance is linked to greater orthodox religiosity and collectivist social orientation, while despair-avoidance is linked to greater secularism and individualist social orientation. Study 1 examines different reactions to an experimentally manipulated threat among more religious and more secularized Undergraduate students. This study shows that while religious participants defend against threat by bolstering resources external to the self, secular participants bolster the self's internal resources. Study 2 examines threat orientations and defense patterns in a traditionalist Mennonite congregation, a Unitarian Universalist congregation, and Undergraduate students. Traditionalist Mennonites were more likely to experience guilt and less likely to experience anxiety and concerns with meaninglessness. Unitarian Universalists were more likely to experience anxiety and less likely to experience concerns with self-condemnation. Undergraduates were more likely to experience anxiety and death-related angst. As a whole, the results show that culture partly determines different patterns of existential threat experience, a finding with implications for cultural and existential psychology, as well as for considerations of the functionality and impact of different cultural patterns.